Obama campaign: We're winning in the field

10/11/12 1:24 PM EDT

The Obama campaign is touting the state of their field operation amid concerns by supporters and party rank-and-file that Mitt Romney is moving into the lead in many national polls.

On a conference call Thursday just hours before the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, campaign manager Jim Messina and field director Jeremy Bird said that the campaign's grassroots operation was unmatched — no matter what the polls are saying.

"We gauge our ground game on verifiable numbers that tell the real story: voter registration and early voting," Messina told reporters. "In nearly every battleground state, margins on both counts are bigger than they were in 2008. We've registered more voters than '08, we've knocked on more doors and we've talked to more people."

Bird said that the Obama campaign had made huge strides in both registration and early voting in key states — and were way past the benchmarks they set in 2008.

"Democrats, in party registration, lead Republicans in nearly every battleground state," Bird said. "Democrats have out-registered Republicans in every single battleground state for the past three months. Latino voter registration has greatly exceeded registration among non-Latino whites, and Latino registration references had increasingly favored Democrats since the election in 2008.

"Most striking, most new registrations are younger than 30 — and, in fact, more than 4 in five new registrants in these battleground states are women, young people and minorities," he said, pointing to groups that all favor the president in national and state polls.

In two key states — Iowa, Ohio — Bird said that the Democrats were leading in both ballots requested and ballots cast. In Florida, Democrats had cut the Republicans absentee voter registration requests.

"We've been at this for years and we have acted early in the battleground states," Bird said. "It takes time to build the kind of tried and true grassroots campaign that the president believes in that will make the difference on November 6th."

"You can't fake a real ground game. if you don't have one, you can't compensate with a billion dollar barrage of false ads at the eleventh hour," he said.